In the minds of The Boosh, animals take on roles that even the fantasies of David Attenborough could not match. Zebras seduce women, starfish ride motorbikes, and moths participate in the insect version of Give Us a Clue. This double act is for those who like their surrealism neat, reaching levels of absurdity that have encouraged comparisons with figures ranging from Eddie Izzard to Samuel Beckett. Whether it's yeti porn, attention-seeking spiders, warped fashion commentary or jazz-playing horses, Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding will take you to a world that leaves dreams fading away into normality.
Yet when you see these two on stage for the first time, what strikes you is not their weirdness but their charm. Imagine them - Noel (26), stylishly beautiful, drawing the audience in with a mixture of childlike innocence and glamrock poses, and Julian (31), a staring-eyed, mop-haired maniac, conjuring absurdly funny images out of the air with a demonic flourish. When former Perrier award winner Jenny Eclair saw them performing Arctic Boosh at this year's Edinburgh festival, she was seduced by the onstage chemistry, which she described quite simply as "love". They perform their comedy like two old-handers playing a game of surreal one-upmanship, sparring with each other at the same time as they revel in each other's abilities.
When I meet them they are exhausted from a successful gig the night before, but the conversation comes to life whenever they get a chance to zip into absurd mode. Asked how they met, Noel kicks off with: "We were on a safari, weren't we?" Julian replies, "Yeah, we were on different safaris. I was going one way, looking for lions, Noel was going the other way..." "...looking for hyenas and scavengers". They start to grin - the game has taken off now, and Julian continues: "I looked through my binoculars, and saw..." "...me shagging a zebra," cries Noel.
The true story of how they met is almost as good. The partnership that has so far won the 1998 Perrier best newcomer award, a 1999 Perrier award nomination, and a GLR radio series, started two years ago when Noel began, in effect, to stalk Julian after seeing him perform at his art college. "He was the first comedian I'd seen I could relate to totally," Noel revealed at Edinburgh this year. "That led me to do some comedy myself, after which a mate of Julian's phoned him to say: 'There's a new bloke doing what you do, only a bit different'. I'd go to Julian's gigs and leave him little gifts, but then I'd vanish before he came off stage, like Nosferatu. Eventually he phoned me and asked the only question I could have said yes to: 'Do you want to join me in writing the new Goodies?'"
The result of this bizarre courtship is a partnership that initially defies analysis. If you were trying to define The Boosh very broadly, you could say they fall into the tradition of comedians such as Harry Hill, Eddie Izzard, and Reeves & Mortimer, but they are sexier than Hill, more improvisational than Izzard and, according to comedian Stewart Lee, more linguistically inventive than Reeves and Mortimer.
They drag the audience outside the boundaries of normality (in The Mighty Boosh they were zookeepers in the jungle, and in Arctic Boosh postmen who travel to the north pole) and create a world that rejects all logic, populated by characters such as Uncle Pedro, "the fisherman who never fished... that was his twist", lecherous yeti, and the requisite number of talking/dancing animals. Music is very much a part of their comedy - Julian is obsessed by jazz, and Noel by Mick Jagger - and they perform numbers with lyrics such as "You broke my muesli", which make them sound like Frank Zappa's love-children.
Their keen awareness of what goes on below the dialogue line in comedy is picked up on by Lee, who directed Arctic Boosh both for Edinburgh and for this month's London run. "They like words for their sounds as much as their meanings," he says. "I think you could be Greek, not understand a word they say, and still find it funny." The pair's name alone reflects this - they rejected the title Barratt & Fielding because it made them sound like solicitors, and went for The Boosh because it was a funny-sounding abstract noun that would confuse people.
Fame, of course, will override this, and since Perrier nominations tend to come a step before a television contract, it will probably not be long before Boosh becomes a buzzword. Both have been on TV before - after becoming a finalist in the 1996 Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award, Noel starred alongside Lee and Eclair in Channel 5's The Comedy Network, and then on Channel 4's stand-up show, Gas. Julian appeared on The Stand-up Show on BBC1 in 1996 before going on to Gas and then performing with his spoof techno band, The Pod, on BBC2's Comedy Nation.
Lee warns that, as a pair, they will have to discipline themselves more for TV, but even he is in no doubt that The Boosh has a powerful formula for success. Both Julian and Noel have distinctive styles, which would blend perfectly for the camera in a relationship comparable to that of Morecambe and Wise. Julian, who is tall and dark, accompanies his act with a range of grotesque facial expressions that can send laughter levels soaring in seconds - grimacing in slow motion like a man who's sat on a pin, or gazing with cynical mysticism into the audience.
By contrast, Noel is small and blond, and seduces the audience with his wide-eyed gaze and faux-naive attitude. Think of a newly born deer with glitter eye make-up, and you're halfway to understanding the charm of the man who will warm the crowd up with phrases such as "Look at you, you cheeky moths". He spends a lot of time being ribbed for his naivety by Julian's tortured, introverted genius. The twist, however, is that Noel is more in touch with reality - and so while Julian pontificates and patronises, Noel normally completes the mission, solves the problem, and gets the girl.
Such is the nature of The Boosh's relentless inventiveness that, when I look back on earlier interviews, they have rarely given the same answer to any question twice. Their onstage characters blend with their offstage personalities, evaporating the moment you try to get too serious. One constant which does stand out, however, is their passion for the surreal. "We're driven by the absurd," says Noel, "and never observational comedy, or mainstream stuff." So they won't be the kind of comedians who end up on Question Time 10 years down the line? "No," says Julian, "we're just interested in being ridiculous."
Arctic Boosh is at The Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (0181-741 2311), December 13-January 8.